The classic comedy the Coen brothers wished they’d directed: “It’s not in our capabilities”
Few filmmakers are responsible for as many modern comedy greats as the Coen brothers, and yet, for their own reasons, Joel and Ethan were envious of a cult favourite that evolved to become one of the genre’s most beloved 21st-century offerings.
On paper, that sounds ludicrous. After all, the siblings scripted and helmed Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski, four features that are overflowing with blackly hilarious moments, standout comedic scenes, and line deliveries that still get a laugh three decades after the fact, if not even longer.
Few auteurs, whether solo artists or double-acts like the Coens, have been delivered so many different kinds of laughs in so many different kinds of movies, either. Beyond the four mentioned above, there’s the screwball period stylings of The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the farcical Burn After Reading, the hammy Hail, Caesar!, and the deadpan Inside Llewyn Davis.
Most filmmakers who strike gold in the comedy arena continue mining that vein until there’s nothing left, not to name any Judd Apatow and his ‘Frat Pack’ in particular, but the Coens have effortlessly weaved between time periods, backdrops, genres, and settings to dig up a career’s worth of hilarious bullion.
However, what they lacked for a long time were the box office receipts to back up their consistent acclaim. Until Intolerable Cruelty, their tenth picture, the brothers had never made a movie that cleared $100 million in ticket sales, or even $80 million, for that matter.
No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading, and True Grit saw them go three-for-four, with A Serious Man the outlier, and when reflecting on whether or not the star-studded affair that saw George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, and more nibble on the scenery in tale of government oversight go wrong, they pondered the very meaning of the genre.
After helpfully describing it as “sort of” a comedy, Ethan clarified that, although you could call Burn After Reading that, it wasn’t a comedy like Evan Almighty, which is just as well, since the Jim Carrey-less sequel to the biggest hit of Jim Carrey’s career unsurprisingly went down like a lead balloon and bombed hard.
“Or Anchorman,” Ethan chimed in. “In a way, I wish we could do Anchorman. How much did that movie gross? And I love Will Ferrell. He’s really funny.” The answer is that The Legend of Ron Burgundy grossed $90 million, ironically much less than Burn After Reading, but word-of-mouth, home video sales, and people of a certain age screaming quotes at each other for years made it a modern favourite, even if Joel conceded that making a broad studio comedy is “really not in our capabilities.”
The Coen brothers’ version of Anchorman would be a sight to see, and since they’d clearly keep Ferrell as part of the ensemble, we can only imagine the possibilities of swapping out some of the other cast members for their regulars. John Goodman as Champ Kind? Steve Buscemi as Wes Mantooth? We can see the vision.
